One studio in Hollywood, at least, may not think that this strike situation is really all that bad. A Defamer operative tells us there's a rumor floating around that since it struck its side-deal with the Writers Guild earlier this week, Tom Cruise's United Artists has been deluged with "2,500" scripts as idling agents frantically abandoned their Scrabulous games and retaliatory werewolf attacks to get their clients' projects in front of pretty much the only people who can get anything done at the moment. Is that figure merely the fantasy of some tracking board poster who decided to arbitrarily assign a numerical value to "a shitload"? Probably!

We just love the idea that a giddy Cruise (the buzz over bringing Paul Haggis into his family surely hasn't faded) now begins each day by diving into the enormous pile of screenplays that dominates his office, and, after emerging from the mound holding aloft a bradded trophy, shouts to his overwhelmed development staff, "Now this one's gotta be better than Lions for Lambs. Let's make a movie. No, let's make a thousand movies! We've got the whole business to ourselves!"